I sat down to play Daggerheart, the new roleplaying game from Darrington Press, without really knowing much about it. I knew it was developed by (or at least with input from) Critical Role – I’ve never had much interest in watching actual plays so I’m not overly familiar with Critical Role, but I do have to acknowledge how much their work has done to glamorize tabletop roleplaying in a positive way.
Judging from the cover art, I assumed it would be a fairly general, D&D-style fantasy setting, but I didn’t know whether the game system would be a D&D clone, a completely new rules set, or something in between. The quickstart adventure does a good job explaining the basics, with a script for the GM to follow that goes over the game’s most important concepts, and an ingeniously formatted explainer sheet that slides back and forth under the main character sheet to create a sidebar that details what a player needs to know about the game’s mechanics.
Different, But Not That Different
The mechanics of Daggerheart will be familiar to D&D players. It is very clear that the game was designed by people who have spent a lot of time playing 5th Edition, and have identified the things they do and don’t like about it. The core mechanic is “roll and add your bonus,” but rather than a single 20 sided die, players roll two twelve sided dice of different colors, one representing “hope” and the other, “fear.”
The sum of the two dice plus an attribute-based bonus determines success or failure, but there’s an added wrinkle. If the hope die is higher, the player gains a hope point, which they can spend to activate special abilities or give advantage to another player (more on that in a moment). If the fear die is higher, the Gamemaster gets a fear point, which they can use to add complications and empower the players’ adversaries. The game calls this “rolling with hope” or “rolling with fear.” Even more interestingly, any roll of doubles is a critical hit, allowing the player to heal stress (a form of minor damage) and deal more damage in combat.
This simple mechanic adds a lot to the game play without adding undue complexity. Apart from the tactile satisfaction of rolling two dice instead of just one (come on, hearing dice rattle is one of the purest joys of tabletop gaming), the hope/fear dynamic makes every roll answer more than just “did I succeed or not” – there’s a bit more risk/reward, and during play we found that we wanted to attempt more roll-worthy actions, for the chance of generating more hope points, even at the risk of possibly giving more fear points to the GM.
The game eschews the traditional skill list, instead using a standard spread of six attributes that should cover more player actions. The character sheet includes a short list of possible uses for each attribute, which I thought made the game a bit more fluid. Often in other games I find that not having a bonus in a particular skill will prevent players from even trying the related action – Daggerheart shifts the focus away from “do I have that skill or not,” to “I want to try something, which attribute should I use?”
All the Pretty Cards
Characters in Daggerheart start out with five special abilities, gained from their background (the geography or community they come from), ancestry (the usual run of fantasy races, plus a few more unusual choices like frogs and mushroom people), and character class. Rather than cluttering the character sheet with more text, these abilities are spelled out on cards – print and play versions can be found on the Daggerheart website, or the core set comes with a set of full color printed cards in a fancy box.
Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on whether I think cards are useful in RPGs, or just distracting. In this case I think I’m sold on the cards, they made it easy to tell at a glance what your player options are, and the images served as a helpful reminder – “oh yeah, I’m a Giant! That means…”
Outside the confines of the quickstart, the card system helps with what in D&D I sometimes refer to as “ability fatigue” – at higher levels, characters have so many options that it can take forever just to decide what to do on your turn, and there’s always that lingering suspicion that you’ve forgotten something that might have helped. In Daggerheart, players are limited to five active cards at any one time. At higher levels, they’ll start to accumulate more abilities, requiring them to settle on which ones they want to have active. Cards can be swapped out during rests, and even on the fly by taking stress, but limiting characters to five abilities at a time should make for some interesting decision-making and help keep the game moving.
We’re All in This Together
One thing I really appreciated about Daggerheart was the way in which it encourages teamwork between players. Any player can spend a hope point to “help” another player, giving them an extra d6 to add to their roll. It’s a simple way to improve another player’s chance of succeeding, without getting in the way of the hope/fear dynamic.
It’s only touched on in the quickstart, but the full rules also have a more elaborate way to spend hope on teamwork: the tag team roll. Once per game session, this allows two players (for a cost of 3 hope from each player) to collaborate on a powerful action. They each roll, taking the better of the two rolls, and if it’s in combat they both roll damage against the target. For X-Men fans, this should call the famous “fastball special” to mind…
Let’s Get to Fightin’
Combat is handled in essentially the same way as non-combat encounters. There’s no initiative or rigid turn order; instead, players keep taking actions, in whatever order they want, until someone rolls with fear, at which point the GM gets a turn. After the GM acts with an adversary, they can let the action switch back to the players, or spend fear points to take additional turns.
Interestingly, the gamemaster doesn’t use the 2d12 hope/fear system, instead rolling a traditional d20 for adversary attacks, with critical hits on a natural 20 and advantage/disadvantage handled by taking the best or worst of two rolls. They can use fear points to interrupt the players’ run of actions, and also to activate special abilities on their monsters.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like the way Daggerheart handles damage. On first glance it looks a little fiddly, but during play it turned out to be pretty smooth and a little more interesting than just marking off hit points. Each character has two damage threshold numbers, determined by their level and the kind of armor they’re wearing. Incoming damage is then compared to these numbers: if it’s lower than the first number it’s minor damage, if it’s in the middle it’s major, and if it’s higher than the second number it’s Severe. Players mark off one, two or three hit points depending on how severe the damage is. It actually makes tracing damage a little less fiddly, and it makes damage-reducing abilities a little more interesting. Armor can be used to lower the damage one level, and some character abilities allow them to reduce damage levels as well.
Is It a Contender?
Daggerheart came out of the gate as strong as any game could. It’s in a popular genre (heroic high fantasy) and the presentation is top notch, with the kind of slick artwork that has become industry standard for roleplaying games. Mechanically the game is solid, but really it is the association with Critical Role that has put Daggerheart over the top and led to its first printing selling out in record time.
I don’t think any game is ever going to unseat Dungeons & Dragons – it will always be the top dog by virtue of brand recognition if nothing else, and no other game, no matter how good, is going to put much of a dent in that. But if you put both games in front of me and asked me to choose which one to invest time and energy in, I would probably choose Daggerheart. I feel like it scratches exactly the same itch, and in a more refined and interesting way.
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